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Saturday, November 08, 2014

`The Side That Has Already Lost'

“A
writer should know that only a few of those who look at him will actually see
him.”

Few look at Nicolás GómezDávila – Don Colacho-- and fewer see him. Among the latter
is a young writer new to me, Chris R. Morgan, who has written a stylish tribute
to the Colombian master aphorist (1913-1994). How pleasing to see a young writer
with sufficient maturity to recognize Don Colacho’s worth: “On the surface, these aphorisms seem like throwaways. Yet
Gómez Dávila’s mind was not wired for frivolity. In spite of their brevity,
each escolio has a sculpted composition, fashioned to conform to an
overriding vision that is as rigid in its consistency as it was free from
ideological conventions.”

Our thinking grows
increasingly binary, a predisposition encouraged by the nature of “social
media” and the more fashionable neighborhoods of the digital world: “like” as a
substitute for “think.” With Don Colacho, his aphorisms, read individually, are
calls to self-examination. They betray our will to dishonesty and cowardice,
intellectual and otherwise. Only superficially are they tweet-like. Morgan’s
choice of “sculpted” is precise and inspired. All the dross has been removed. Even
when he is mistaken, Don Colacho is usefully
mistaken. So is Morgan:

“If
conservatives are characterized by nostalgia, reactionaries are characterized
by decadence. Conservatives build networks and speak in sound bites;
reactionaries build mausoleums and speak in epitaphs. Reactionaries are
aesthetic rather than practical thinkers. They play alongside, if not across,
the border of tragedy and fatalism. Civil debate is meaningless to the side
that has already lost.”

This
might be Morgan's gloss on such GómezDávila-esque aperçus as these:

“The reactionary today is merely a traveler who suffers shipwreck
with dignity.”

“The pure reactionary is not a dreamer of abolished pasts, but a
hunter of sacred shades on the eternal hills.”

2 comments:

Thank you, Mr. Kurp for your thoughtful response to my piece, especially regarding its style, which given the subject matter was something I wanted to get just right. Of course good editing was just as instrumental. I'm quite proud of how it turned out. Again, thank you.